President Donald Trump says he doesn’t want to waste time in talks to end the war in Ukraine.
His growing frustration appears to be aimed not at the Kremlin, but at Kyiv and its backers in Europe, who Thursday faced a deepening rift with the United States at a decisive moment.
As those longtime U.S. allies struggled to balance the mounting pressure from Washington with their reluctance to give in to Russia's hard-line demands, Trump signaled that his patience was running thin.
“They would like us to go to a meeting over the weekend in Europe, and we’ll make a determination, depending on what they come back with. We don’t want to be wasting time,” he said.
Trump was speaking at a roundtable with business leaders Wednesday before Europe sent its response to the latest peace plan, focused on the pivotal issue of territorial concessions.
“Sometimes you have to let people fight it out, and sometimes you don’t,” Trump added, casting further doubt on his desire to be involved in a new round of talks.
Trump also said he had exchanged “pretty strong words” on Ukraine in a call with European leaders, whom he called “very good friends of mine.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at a news conference Thursday that he, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had suggested to Trump that they finalize peace proposals together with the U.S. over the weekend.
The continent has been shaken by Trump's latest shift after months of stop-start diplomacy that has yet to yield any breakthroughs.
NATO chief Mark Rutte struck a drastic note Thursday as he urged allies to step up defense efforts. “We are Russia’s next target,” he said, warning of a conflict that could be on "the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.”
Trump's increasingly sharp rhetoric toward Ukraine and Europe — which he has described as "decaying" and "weak" — follows a new U.S. national security strategy that took aim at the continent and was welcomed by Moscow.
“I think he doesn’t want to get pulled into another round of negotiations,” said Neil Melvin, director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security think tank. “He feels that the deal needs to be done, and I think that there is a real risk that he will do a deal over the heads of the Europeans with Russia.”
Trump may feel that the Europeans are trying to drag their feet with endless meetings, Melvin said. That "is feeding into a wider sentiment amongst many of those around Trump, which is, I think, to say mildly, a skepticism about Europe as an actor, and particularly the European Union."
The Kremlin signaled Thursday that it saw itself as increasingly on the same page as Washington.
The two sides had now “resolved all misunderstandings” on Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “We have reason to believe that the Americans are sincerely interested in this conflict being resolved fairly,” he said, after talks between Trump’s envoys and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow this month.
Lavrov, who has been largely absent from the peace talks but re-emerged in recent days, said Russia had submitted additional proposals to the U.S. regarding collective security guarantees, which Ukraine and Europe say are essential to any deal.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that negotiators are wrestling with the question of territorial possession in U.S.-led peace talks on ending the war with Russia, including the future of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, one of the world’s 10 biggest atomic plants.
Among the issues Zelenskyy shared were that Russia wants to incorporate the entire Donbas, which Ukraine opposes. He also said the U.S. proposed turning Donbas into a “free economic zone.” That would mean Ukrainian forces withdraw from Donbas and Russia refrains from entering the parts of Donbas it does not currently occupy.
Zelenskyy revealed details of the ongoing discussions before he headed into urgent talks Thursday with leaders and officials from about 30 countries that support Kyiv’s efforts to obtain fair terms in any settlement to halt nearly four years of fighting.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine submitted a 20-point plan to the U.S. on Wednesday, with each point possibly accompanied by a separate document detailing the settlement terms.
“We are grateful that the U.S. is working with us and trying to take a balanced position,” Zelenskyy told reporters in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. “But at this moment it is still difficult to say what the final documents will look like.”
Ukraine has been trying to strike a delicate balance between appeasing Trump and not giving up crucial territory it still controls in the eastern Donbas region, which Moscow has vowed to take either diplomatically or by force.
Ukraine is increasingly on the back foot, but as negotiations continued, both sides appeared determined to claim the upper hand on both land and sea.
Ukrainian sea drones Wednesday hit and disabled a tanker that Kyiv said was part of the Kremlin’s “shadow fleet” of vessels alleged to be transporting its oil illegally under sanctions.
Ukraine also insisted it still had some control of a key hub in the east, despite Moscow's repeated claims to have taken it.
Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky said that his troops continued to defend the city of Pokrovsk and that “the volume of Russian lies is many times greater than the real pace of advance of Russian troops.”
The Kremlin has maintained that it has the upper hand on the battlefield, and it has used its perceived advantage as a bargaining chip with the U.S.
"The strategic initiative is entirely in the hands of the Russian armed forces," Putin said Thursday as he received reports of the claimed capture of the city of Siversk in the Donetsk region, the Russian news agency Tass reported.
